Answered from Brian Kernighan: Inside Bell Labs, The Best Programmer, Why C Won · Ryan Peterman · 2026-10-26
Brian Kernighan said his standard Unix demo for Bell Labs visitors was a six- or seven-program pipeline that found possible spelling mistakes by comparing a document's words with a dictionary. Knowing it ran too slowly on the old machines, before CIA director William Colby's visit he ran it the night before and saved the output. During the visit he ran a shell script that slept two seconds and then printed the saved result. Colby, escorted by Bell Labs' Bill Baker and an aide with a briefcase chained to his arm, appeared impressed.
Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Ryan Peterman (2026-10-26). Read the whole episode summary →